Embodied texts: Reading new subjectivity through Charles Olson and Muriel Rukeyser

Postmodernism views the Self always from within a conundrum of universal fragmentation. Such anti-idealism draws fundamental criticism. First, can we reconstitute subjectivity, ourselves, alternatively? Secondly, and more importantly, should we necessarily try? This dissertation explores the possibility of restoring agency through poetic language. As poets we constitute Self as a holistic subject. My methodology critically evaluates existing language approaches to questions of subjectivity. In particular, feminist models that theorize difference as female/feminine based upon a male/masculine standard falsely constructed as universal are harmonized with a poetics which I introduce as androgynous, challenging older gender models, images and constructs by asserting that reading is a progressive, holistic process toward individuation. The consequence is a New Humanistic poetics that is grounded in forms of intersubjectivity. Androgyny posits multiplicity and ‘difference’ as the social norm.; The comparison of Olson's and Rukeyser's (neo-Romantic) establishes this poetic trajectory toward New Humanism. Rather than attempt to define what poetry is, I explore what poetry does. To ‘poet’ is an active stance. I adopt my own version of Olson's stance and tell this poetics through my own istorin. I compare Olson's theory of “projective verse” to Rukeyser's poetics of relational process, reading her concept of energy sharing as a plea for holism in the light of stereotypically fragmented female experience in patriarchal society. Whereas Olson tried to evaporate himself into the speech act, Rukeyser called upon her “real” voice to unify her body “entire” so that she could speak to/from within her community; she found her calling in poetry (“Then I Saw What the Calling Was,” CPMR 276). Thus, poetic speech locates us, not just as mimesis but as actuality.; My dissertation demonstrates autobiographical narrative as core theory and poetic praxis, through which ‘I’ read Olson and Rukeyser as alchemical agents of poetic social identity, i.e., polis. Their poetics locate the poetic event in the kinetic energy of encounter—the liminal space—between poet and reader, upon which libidinous, alchemical condition poetry stands, as does the poet (Olson's “stance”). I explore subjectivity in terms of the self-constituting, active imagination of the poet.